A post by an individual developer, Gathin, about cleaning up their parents’ television on October 17, 2026, has turned into an open-source project that, by October 24, carried 30,900 stars on GitHub, 3,600 forks and tested configuration lists for 260 TV models, according to the project’s repository. The tool, called CleanYourTV, uses an AI coding assistant to switch off a television’s ad services, sponsored content rows and telemetry over the home Wi-Fi network, then installs a minimal home screen in place of the manufacturer’s launcher.
In Short
A developer used an AI coding tool to turn off the ads and tracking software on their parents’ Android-based TV and replace its home screen with a plain one. They shared how they did it, and in a week thousands of people did the same to their own TVs and published lists for hundreds of models. The ads on a TV’s home screen are something TV makers and Google sell, so a free tool that switches them off touches a part of the TV ad business, though nothing it does is permanent and a software update can bring the ads back.
The post
“Vibe coded my parents’ TV this afternoon!” Gathin wrote on X on October 17, 2026. “It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix.” The post continued: “Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.” The post closed with: “Looks like an Apple TV now lol.”
The phrase refers to vibe coding, the practice of describing software in plain language and letting an AI model write it. By October 24 the post displayed 8.4 million views, 929 replies, 2,300 reposts and 35,000 likes. In a reply the same day, Gathin linked the repository and wrote that the “prompt, launcher source and the gotchas I hit are all here,” adding that the method “works on any Android TV / Google TV, everything is reversible and feel free to tweak it to your needs.” A follow-up article on X dated October 19 carried the headline “(Re)introducing…